Six A0 Foam Board Panels on 3mm Foamex, Ordered at 21:36 and Delivered Before 1pm
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The creative team at Selfridges sent files at 21:36 on a Wednesday night: six presentation boards, A0, full colour, on 3 mm foamex, marked ASAP. Files checked and quoted inside twenty-two minutes, paid by 22:42, and delivered to an address in Clerkenwell, EC1R before 1pm the next day. Nothing about the print was difficult. What made it possible was that the files were right when they arrived.
Written by Maciej Antosz, Production Manager at Silver Image London ·
This is an account of one job, not a turnaround promise. Send us yours and we will come back with a firm figure.
Wednesday night to Thursday lunchtime
The times below are as they sit in the email thread. The whole job was agreed inside about an hour, at an hour when most trade counters have been shut for half a day.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 21:36 | Artwork arrived by transfer link. Brief in one line: six copies, A0, 3 mm foamex, full colour, ASAP. |
| 21:58 | Files opened and checked, price back, invoices raised. Our note on the artwork: sized correctly, high res, ready for printing — which is rarer than it sounds and is the reason this job never stalled. |
| 22:13 | Payment problem, not a print problem: one invoice went through, the others would not. Split billing sorted between us in the thread. |
| 22:42 | “Understood. All paid.” |
| 23:25 | We asked for the delivery address and confirmed the ETA: before 1pm. The client asked to be called on arrival, which is the right instruction for a delivery to a residential door rather than a manned reception. |
| Next morning | Six A0 boards delivered to EC1R, inside the window. |
Written up from the email thread. Nobody is named, the delivery address is not published beyond its postcode district, no figures from the invoices are, and nothing that was printed on the boards is described here — that is the client’s material, not ours.
Foamex and foam board are the same thing
This trips people up constantly, so it is worth saying plainly: foamex and foam board are two names for the same material, and you can order either and get the same panel. Foamex is a brand name that became the trade word for it, the way people say Sellotape. Foam board, foamboard and PVC foam board are the same product; Palight and Palfoam are other manufacturers of it.
The one genuine confusion worth clearing up is with foam core, which is a different material: paper faces over a foam centre, used for mounting photographs. It is lighter and cheaper, and it dents if you look at it. What you want for boards that get carried around a building is the rigid PVC kind, whatever name the supplier prints on the invoice.
Why A0 foam board, and not paper or correx
Presentation boards get handled. They are carried between rooms, leaned against walls, propped on easels, laid on tables and picked up again by people talking over them. That rules out paper and mounted card, which buckle the first time somebody grips one by a corner.
Foamex, or foam board, is rigid PVC foam sheet. At 3 mm it is stiff enough that an A0 board — 841 by 1189 mm, which is a big thing to hold — stays flat when carried one-handed, and light enough that six of them are not a two-person job. The face is matt, so a board photographs and reads under downlights without the hotspot you get from gloss.
The usual alternative for short-life work is correx, which is fluted plastic. It is cheaper and it is the right choice for a site board or an outdoor sign, but the flutes show through a large flat colour area, so it is the wrong material the moment the board is a design piece rather than a notice.
The other question people ask is thickness. 3 mm is the presentation standard; 5 mm and 10 mm exist and are for boards that must free-stand or take fixings. For anything carried and shown, 3 mm is stiff enough and noticeably easier to move.
A0 is a size decision as much as a material one
A0 is one square metre of paper — 841 by 1189 mm — and it is the size at which a board stops being a document and becomes something a room can look at together. That is why it is the default for architectural presentations, exhibition panels, degree shows and internal strategy sessions like this one.
It is also the point where domestic printing ends. Almost nothing outside a production floor prints A0, which is why A0 printing is a trade service rather than something an office does in-house, and why the searches for it are so often prefixed with near me and same day.
Twenty-two minutes, and the reason it was twenty-two minutes
Files landed at 21:36 and were quoted at 21:58. That gap is short because there was nothing to query: correct size, adequate resolution, print-ready. Compare that with a job where the supplied file turned out to be a mock-up — same speed of reply, but the answer had to be a question rather than a price.
An overnight job has almost no slack in it. Every round trip about artwork comes out of the same night, and the difference between print-ready files and nearly-right files is usually the difference between a delivery before lunch and a delivery that misses the meeting.
Delivery across Central London, and why the postcode matters
This one went from a West End client to a residential address in EC1R, the Clerkenwell and Finsbury district, first thing the following morning. Six A0 boards are not a courier-bag job — they are flat, rigid, a metre long, and they travel boxed and upright.
We run this route constantly, along with the rest of the City of London, Angel and Islington and Fitzrovia. The reason it matters for a board job is not distance but handling: a board that arrives creased at a corner has failed, however fast it got there.
If you are ordering foam board or foamex at short notice
- Say the size, the material and the thickness. “Six A0 foam board, 3 mm foamex, full colour” is a complete specification. It took one line and it is why this quote came back in twenty-two minutes.
- Supply artwork at final size. A0 artwork built at A4 and scaled up is the most common cause of a board that looks soft when it is standing in a room.
- Send the files with the enquiry. The clock on an overnight job starts when the artwork arrives, not when the email does.
- Tell us if the delivery is a door rather than a reception. A residential delivery needs a phone call on arrival; a loading bay needs a name. Neither is a problem, but each is a different plan.
- Choose foam board for panels that get handled, correx for boards that get fixed. The mistake is ordering fluted plastic for a design piece and rigid foam for a site sign.
Sizes, thicknesses and finishing are on the foamex board printing page, sizes from A3 to A0 on large format printing, and for work that has to be finished inside the working day, same day printers.
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